Link: thingsmagazine.net: issue 6 - Soane in Budapest?.
(((For some reason I've reached a point in my life when I just completely dote on stuff like this. This is making my day.)))
"A kiosk is much more than a box. Telephone boxes are mere boxes: crude, rectilinear constructions of metal and glass which, since the advent of British Telecom and its competitors, litter our streets in a tawdry cacophony of bad manners. Radiating ephemerality, they bring the once noble art of street furniture into disrepute. But kiosks are something more: they are Architecture, so that telephone kiosks – like sentry boxes – may be regarded as miniature buildings.
"In origin, the kiosk was Turkish: a light open pavilion or summer house ‘generally not intended for permanent occupancy’ such as may still be found all over Istanbul. By 1865, so the Shorter Oxford Dictionary tells us, a kiosk was also ‘a light structure resembling this, for the sale of newspapers, a bandstand, etc.’ And from these evolved the form of the first ‘public call offices’ authorised by the Postmaster General in 1884. Some were round or octagonal, with a tall, pointed domed top, like the old poster-covered newspaper kiosks of Paris which have suddenly invaded British cities in recent years. But most were like sentry boxes with a pitched roof, or, often, a pyramidal roof. Occasionally they were thatched, if appropriate. And the Arts and Crafts architect C.F.A. Voysey designed a gothic one in 1923 with alternative ogee or crenellated summits.
"The point is that telephone kiosks, as miniature buildings, had proper roofs, and not wretched flat tops to collect litter...."
